Pandora Says High Royalty Rates Are Putting Them Out of Business

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Web radio giant (and music recommendation service) Pandora is on the verge of shutting down due to high royalty fees, says the company's founder. Despite a million daily listeners and an iPhone application that attracts roughly 40,000 new customers a day, Pandora's founder says, "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for webcasting." The cause of death may be a decision made last year by a federal panel that doubled the per-song performance royalty of tracks played on Internet radio stations. "I was on the bus when I get this message on my Treo," Westergren tells the Washington Post. "I thought, 'We're dead.' " Pandora stands to lose 70 percent of its $25 million revenue in royalty fees. Negotiations are underway between Webcasters and SoundExchange, a company that represents artists and record companies, to lower the fees. By comparison, traditional radio stations don't pay any royalties, while satellite radio stations face a much smaller fee. On June 26th, 2007, thousands of Internet radio stations went silent to protest the higher fees.

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Song Stories

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Fishbone | 1985

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.

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